What is the most powerful memory you have? For most people one would think that their wedding, where they were in a natural disaster, something in a church would stand out. I'm betting though, that this isn't the case really.
I used to think that the sense of smell was the most powerful sense for recalling times past, and people that we've left behind. The more I explore music that I've lost and found the more I doubt that idea. The more I listen to songs from my past the more I remember the people that were important to me, the more I remember myself from times past. Which brings me to the earlier question. What is the most powerful memory you've had?
For me the first time I locked eyes with my wife, where I was when 11 Sep 01 happened, my wedding, are all right up there, but the most powerful memory for me is so mundane, so pedestrian that it strikes me as absurd.
It was my first job. I was dishwasher. She was a bus girl. Don't expand too much on that, you'll be disappointed. The memory is just me touching her forearm through her jacket. I don't even really remember what I was asking her, but I can remember the feel of her arm in exacting detail. It's like one of those 'slow moments' from Star Trek: Insurrection. I can remember the room fuzzily, her face a bit better, how I felt, but the arm, the touch was electric.
I've never really forgotten this, I pull it out every once and a while to have something to think about in the slack moments. The thing is though, for no reason in particular I've been buying old music of late. Today it was They Might Be Giants, Lincoln. TMBG was featured on a website I frequent today and I thought, 'Hey, I wanna hear Ana Ng'. An iTunes Music Store moment later I've got the album, remembering who I was at 17. Remembering her and the other people who were important in my life at the time. Amazing how they're all women.
It's odd to me that music defines memory in this way. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, thinking about it. It makes sense, listening to music promotes different brain waves, different states of consciousness. Music as background doesn't seem to have the same effect. I don't know if this is because we listen to background music differently, or because the background music of our times has changed since Radio and MTV have diminished in importance.
One of the things that probably cemented Mogadishu in my mind is the music played in the movie 'Blackhawk Down'. Not the score, but the music that the guys were listening to. That cemented them as me, as people of my generation. It didn't hurt that the actors looked like friends of mine, but more than that the music created a link between the actors in the movie, by extension the real people, and myself.
The earliest memories I have of music are Peter Frampton. It was playing when my father bought his stereo. I couldn't have been more than 3 or 4, perhaps younger. I remember where the stereo store was, I remember the smell of new electronics, and Peter Frampton. When ever I hear that voice boxed guitar anymore I am transported back to being a three year old. The next musical memory was Little Feat, the apartment that my parents had when I was, again 3 or 4, the album cover to 'Feats don't fail me now' and drinking cigarette ashes from beer bottles. I wasn't that smart of a three year old.
I can track my life in such a way, stitching together fragments of memory, with a sound track of my life. Everyone probably can. Perhaps it is just now, when I have enough time to explore my own past, so much forgotten, that the concept seems so odd and so welcome.
So... what songs make up the soundtrack of your life?